Anyone who is the least bit surprised by this is fooling themselves. If Twitter weren't much smaller than most people think by every meaningful metric, it would announce a meaningful metric. It has never done that.

'Maintaining meaningful relationships' is a very tiny part of what Twitter is about. Don't let all the 'social' buzz-wordiness fool you. How many people you can usefully follow is simply a function of how much time you spend reading tweets, and how often the people you follow publish tweets.

Existing insider trading regulations already apply. Selling private company stock on the basis of material non-public information is just as illegal is it would be with a public company. The problem is that there is far less transparency here, but there isn't much SM or SP could do about that. The companies involved obviously aren't going to open up their books to those guys, and SM doesn't actually broker final transactions anyway. So there not in a position to clean this up by self-regulating.

If Demand Media is #1 for "how should I organize my scrunchies" then God bless. I suspect no one else is really addressing that question with the same sort of laser focus.

The problem is that many of the questions Demand et al answer are addressed elsewhere. If there is a high quality web page out there I could be reading, but I end up at eHow because its page is better targeted to my exact search query, then I -- Google's customer -- lose out.

It would have been a statement of fact if someone had said it a decade ago. Now it is a statement of not knowing what the fuck you're talking about. Tesla has a higher market cap than AOL. AOL is a corporation, but it's only a "mega corporation" in Tim Armstrong's sweetest dreams.